Marwahin: Hundreds of Palestinian refugees headed to Lebanon’s southern border with Israel on Wednesday marking 60 years since the creation of the Jewish state and exile from what was once Palestine. “We want to return to our country. We desperately miss our country’s soil,” said Mahmud Mahmoud, aged in his 70s, who was wearing a traditional Palestinian headdress.

“We came to this area in a peaceful march against the occupation on this occasion.”

Palestinian men, women and children were turned back by the Lebanese Army as they approached the border fence in the Lebanese village of Marwahin because of the presence of the Israeli military in the nearby Israeli village of Zareet.

Protesters wearing traditional Palestinian dress and carrying flags and pictures of late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, had hoped to approach the fence to meet loved ones on the other side. They used mobile phones to talk to the small group on the other side of the fence to find a meeting point where they could speak face-to-face.

Five hundred children in traditional Palestinian dress also took part in a march in the Ain Al-Hilweh camp in the southern port city of Sidon.

Some of the children carried baskets and other small items in a symbol of how the refugees fled to Lebanon with only a few possessions from their homes.

An estimated 400,000 Palestinian refugees live in Lebanon with most living in one of the 12 refugee camps. Palestinians will on Thursday commemorate the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” of Israel’s creation in 1948, and the expulsion of more than 760,000 Palestinians.